


For Want of a Sickle

by IamShadow21



Series: Abandoned, Unfinished and Unpublished Potter Works [6]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Adolescent Sexuality, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Book 6: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Butterfly Effect, Drugged Sex, F/M, Gen, Incomplete, Love Potion/Spell, M/M, Non-Canonical Character Death, Non-Consensual Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-15
Updated: 2008-10-15
Packaged: 2018-01-07 07:30:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1117192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IamShadow21/pseuds/IamShadow21
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Romilda Vane drops a Sickle in the Owlery and is unable to retrieve it. The knock-on effect of this is astronomical.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. For Want of a Sickle

**Author's Note:**

> I adore what-if AUs, and this was a doozy of an idea that I really wish I'd been able to complete. The ripple effect of events changing and affecting other events was so damnedly intricate, though, that I think I 'took a break' from this story and just never found my way back. I still love the idea, that such a tiny event could change the course of the world.

**Christmas, 1996**  
The coin made a sharp, bright _ping_ as it struck the floor. Romilda gasped and scrambled after it, reaching out just in time for it to slip through her fingers and vanish into a crack in the dirty stone floor of the Owlery. 

She swore. She tried Accio, with no success. She even scrabbled at the gap with her bare hands. It all proved useless, and the ramifications were inescapable. She was a Sickle short.

Though she _could_ run back to the castle and ask to borrow one from a friend, it was a dangerous risk. She was doing something that she knew she could get into a huge amount of trouble for.

With a sigh of resignation, she pulled out a Self-Inking Quill and adjusted the box she’d marked on the Order Form for Weasleys’ Wizard Wheezes. She just couldn’t afford the more expensive Potion.

Less than a week later, the discreet bottle arrived. Unlike the Potion she would have preferred, this one had a much greater chance of failure. Everything had to go exactly as planned.

Unfortunately for Romilda, Harry wouldn’t drink the Gillywater. Nor would he open the Chocolate Cauldrons immediately and taste one in front of her, despite her urging. He stammered something incoherent, thankful and evasive in response, then backed away from her and trotted after that bushy-haired know-it-all.

Up in her dormitory, Romilda shrieked and swore and had what her gran would have called ‘a bit of a paddy’. She’d just spent all of her Christmas money on something that would probably be _wasted_ on that bint, Granger.

 **1st March, 1997**  
Harry was distracted. Ron was happy and triumphant amid his pile of presents, but what he was saying about them wasn’t really penetrating Harry’s circular, obsessive thoughts about Malfoy. He waved away the offered box of chocolates and absentmindedly climbed into his clothes, almost putting his trousers on backwards. Running a hand futilely through his hair, he stood up to walk to the door.

“Ready?”

Ron didn’t answer. Harry turned, only to see him sitting on the edge of the bed, staring down at his clenched fists.

“Ron?” he asked, more gently. “Are you okay?”

Ron gave a shrug, but didn’t turn.

Feeling guilty for possibly missing something important in Ron’s chatter, Harry shuffled over and sat next to his mate on the bed.

“I’m sorry,” he ventured.

Ron’s face crumpled and he bit his lip as though he were holding back a sob. Harry was alarmed, and he slung an awkward arm about Ron’s shoulders. A peculiar kind of shiver went through Ron, and he let out a shuddering sigh.

“I _tried_ , Harry,” he mumbled. “I tried not to, but I just can’t do that any more. It’s not right.”

“Okay,” Harry said, completely confused, wondering what had brought on such an emotional crisis before breakfast.

“I don’t know what to do!” Ron continued, sounding desperate.

“We’ll work it out together,” Harry said supportively, giving Ron’s shoulder a squeeze.

The effect of these words on Ron was electric. He instantly looked up at Harry; his eyes wide and glittering wetly with unshed tears. He searched Harry’s face for any trace of duplicity.

“Really?”

The word was barely a whisper, filled with a kind of incredulous hope.

Harry frowned a little. “Of course! You’re my best friend, Ron.”

Ron’s smile was glorious. “Oh! Oh, _Harry..._ ”

Just as Harry registered that Ron was looking at him in an intense and adoring way that it made him uncomfortable, Ron leant across and kissed him.

Harry’s immediate, panicked response was to freeze. Ron’s lips, sticky and warm and wet, moved over his in a confident way that gave credit to the many hours of practise Ron had been putting in of late. When Harry unfroze enough to open his mouth to protest, suddenly, there was _tongue_. It filled his mouth with a potent combination of chocolate and liqueur and best friend, and after a few seconds, Harry realised he was starting to kiss back. His free hand had somehow made it to Ron’s waist, and Ron was demonstrating somewhat alarming multitasking skills by unbuttoning Harry’s shirt without pausing for breath.

“Breakfast,” Harry gasped frantically, breaking away. “We have to get to breakfast.” For some reason, his hand stayed where it was, on Ron’s waist, stroking back and forth.

Ron blinked. “You’re hungry? Here!” He scrabbled for a moment, and then held a Chocolate Cauldron under Harry’s nose.

It occurred to him immediately _after_ opening his mouth that being handfed chocolate by his best mate wasn’t exactly normal. Then again, neither was all that kissing they seemed to have been doing.

When Harry pressed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, the chocolate shell burst and potent, alcoholic syrup flooded his mouth. It tingled and burnt and sent a rush of heat out to the very tips of his fingers. Ron was watching him hungrily, licking his own lips unconsciously. They were very red, and Ron’s eyes were incredibly blue.

Harry swallowed the dissolved chocolate and felt the room whirl a little around him. 

“Harry?” Ron asked, a little anxiously. 

Harry realised he’d been staring off into space. “Your... your hands,” he blurted. 

Unable to express the enormity of what he felt, he grabbed Ron’s hand and raised it to his lips. There were traces of chocolate on Ron’s fingers. When Harry sucked them off, his tongue laving the pads of Ron’s fingertips, Ron blushed bright red and let out a moan.

Within the next few minutes, the chocolates, Ron’s birthday presents and several layers of clothing ended up on the floor. 

About ten minutes after that, about thirty seconds after they’d discovered how brilliant frottage could be, even through boxers, Hermione and Lavender burst in to the Sixth Year Boys Dormitory to find out why they hadn’t been at breakfast.

The next few minutes went very rapidly. Lavender promptly descended into hysterics. Hermione showed a very un-Prefect-like streak and Stunned her. Seeing the open box and scattered contents, she formed the logical conclusion and went for help. Despite the presence of Ron’s unconscious girlfriend, Harry and Ron very quickly picked up where they had left off, and by the time Hermione returned with Madam Pomfrey in tow, they were post-orgasmic and sated, and lazily kissing their way towards another go. 

Once the antidote had been administered, Ron and Harry had immediately agreed it must have been the drugged chocolates, and swore never to speak of it. Hermione was so understanding and sympathetic about the whole incident, that it made them both squirm. She even kept her smug smiles to a minimum when Ron and Lavender had a cataclysmic fight in the Common Room that evening and broke up. 

Things should have gone back to normal, but they didn’t.

 **15th March 1997**  
“Did you hear?” Neville asked Harry at the breakfast table. “Slughorn _died_ last night.”

Harry felt a stab of guilt. He’d never coaxed the memory out of Slughorn that Dumbledore had wanted. Then he felt even worse for thinking first of the memory, rather than the fact that the man in question was dead.

“Well, he was pretty old,” he offered, taking a sip of juice to cover his internal conflict.

Neville shook his head. “The Ravenclaw team were up at dawn this morning, and they saw the Aurors leaving with the body. Something must have happened. Parvati said that Padma said that Michael Corner said that a House Elf found him when it came to light the fireplace. He hadn’t even gone to bed; just keeled over at his desk.”

“The Killing Curse, you reckon?” Seamus asked, both curious and horror-struck.

“No Dark Mark,” Dean pointed out.

“The Aurors would have gotten rid of it,” Seamus pointed out.

The debate continued. Harry glanced at Ron and noticed he looked a bit pale and sick at the prospect of a murder in the school. Then again, it might have been a reaction to Luna’s theory that Death Eaters were training baby Acromantula as discreet assassins. Harry struggled to resist the very strong urge to find Ron’s hand under the table and squeeze it.

Dumbledore suddenly called for their attention. 

“As I am sure some of you are no doubt already aware,” he said, “last night, Professor Slughorn passed away. He was not only an excellent Potions Master, who taught at this school for many years, but was a very dear friend of mine. There will be no classes today, but I will ask that you please restrict your activities to those that are quiet out of respect for those, such as myself, who feel his loss most keenly. Thank you.”

When Harry got a note shortly after breakfast, asking him to come to Dumbledore’s office immediately, he was a little worried as to how he would find him.

“About Professor Slughorn...” he began, intending to give his condolences.

“The memory! You have it?” Dumbledore asked, his excitement plain to see.

“Er... no,” Harry said, momentarily thrown.

The series of expressions that crossed Dumbledore’s face at hearing this revelation were uncharacteristic to say the least. Anger. Dissatisfaction. Frustration. Harry blinked, and again the headmaster’s expression was tranquil, if coloured with disappointment.

“Unfortunate. We shall have to do without it. Nothing else, today, Harry.”

Harry walked back to the dormitory in a bit of a daze, and lay atop the blanket turning everything over in his mind. No matter which way he viewed it from, he couldn’t escape the fact that Dumbledore seemed to view Slughorn’s death mostly as an annoyance, despite his words at breakfast.

It was yet another unsettling thing to fret about, and lately, he’d had a few of those. For example, things would be going along as usual, and then he’d realise he was watching Ron’s lips as he talked, or fantasising about licking that irresistible strip of skin from his collarbone to his ear. It was even starting to throw him off his game; he’d very nearly missed the Snitch in their game against Hufflepuff because he was watching Ron make another rather brilliant save.

Malfoy’s whereabouts had taken a bit of a back seat to The Ron Problem, of late. He was still worried that Malfoy was up to something, but it was hard to focus on it when he appeared to be having a sexuality crisis. He hadn’t looked at the Map for nearly a week. He’d even seen Ginny and Dean snogging in a corner of the Common Room last night, and only felt nervous that he didn’t feel like he wanted to pull Dean’s arms off, like he used to.

In fact, when Dean came upstairs, flopped on his own bed, and muttered something about women making no sense at all, Harry found himself answering, “You’re smothering her, mate. Give her a bit of space.”

“Guess it’s worth a try,” Dean sighed. “Mum always told me I should be... er... _gentlemanly_ when I got a girl,” he confessed with a bit of an embarrassed grimace, “but it just seems to wind her right up. At first, I thought she wanted me to do more, but I thought she was going to hex me when I pulled out her chair for her at the Library, yesterday.”

“She’s a Weasley,” Harry agreed. “They’re pretty straight forward. It’s all about Quidditch, food and fun. If she wants fancy manners and romance, she’ll enjoy it more bossing you ‘round to get them,” he added, thinking of the way Mrs Weasley ruled the roost at the Burrow.

Dean appeared to think this over for a long moment. “So, drawing a portrait of her for a present would be a bad idea?”

The snowdrift of abandoned parchment in and around Dean’s trunk suddenly made sense.

“Do one of Gwenog Jones instead,” Harry advised. “She’s mad about the Harpies.”

Dean beamed, relieved. “Thanks, Harry. You’re a good mate.”

“Yeah, I am, that,” Harry murmured under his breath, far too quietly for anyone but himself to hear.

 **19th April**  
Harry wasn’t sleeping well. 

End of year examinations were getting closer, and all the teachers, particularly Snape and McGonagall, were riding the students hard. Snape had taught both the Defence Against the Dark Arts and Potions classes for a period of two weeks before Slughorn’s replacement arrived, an arrangement that seemed to, unbelievably, make him even more bad-tempered than before. He looked more sallow than ever, and had deep shadows under each eye: Harry suspected he was using a Time Turner or something similar in order to be able to cover both subjects. Harry’s performance in his Potions class had taken a predictable nosedive, due in no small part to the loss of the annotated copy of Advanced Potion Making. Snape had swooped on him unexpectedly during the brewing of a particularly tricky elixir, and Harry didn’t think he’d seen him so furious since the incident with the Pensieve the year before. Snape had confiscated the book, taken fifty points from Gryffindor and assigned him detentions scrubbing cauldrons by hand every Saturday for a month. Ron had been sympathetic; Hermione had been impossibly smug.

Dumbledore had displayed two more memories for Harry to think over, both of Tom Riddle in young adulthood. Though he tried to be receptive to what Dumbledore was giving him, he couldn’t help but be suspicious. It felt too much like he was only being shown what the old man wanted him to see. 

Harry had instead begun spending a large amount of his free time in the library, under the cover of studying for his examinations. His attempts to find any information on Horcruxes met with nothing but dead ends, but he did find a very useful book on magical artefacts with a whole section devoted to objects linked to the Hogwarts founders. Pretty soon, he had a whole notebook full of information on the Cup and the Locket, and a list of other items that Voldemort might have coveted. Some of them were long lost, like Ravenclaw’s Diadem, but Harry wasn’t willing to discard any possibilities at this point. After all, Riddle had had over forty years to search and plenty of Dark contacts and resources to call upon. Dumbledore didn’t know or wasn’t willing to tell Harry details of what Riddle did in those years between the memories. Harry rather suspected the latter, and chafed at what was either a lack of trust, an attempt to protect him, and unwillingness to be fully open with him, or a combination of all three. 

He hadn’t told Dumbledore about the notebook. He figured that if he was going to be the one to kill Voldemort, he should start thinking for himself. He thought that maybe Dumbledore suspected he was keeping things to himself, and thought he saw traces of sadness in his eyes from time to time, but Harry remembered Sirius and hardened his heart. If Dumbledore had been honest with him sooner, Sirius might still be alive.


	2. For Want of a Sickle - Notes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here are my notes about the knock-on effect, and how certain things differed or altered completely. When you see the scope of it, it's easy to see why I became overwhelmed.

Because Harry doesn't talk to Hagrid outside the hospital wing, he doesn't hear about Snape and Dumbledore fighting. Therefore, less suspicion of Snape.

Because Ron is able to play in the Quidditch match, Harry is at the pitch earlier and doesn't run into Malfoy and Polyjuiced Crabbe & Goyle. Less suspicion of Malfoy. Ron is able to play, so the game is won. Because Ron plays, Harry is not knocked out and does not think to send Kreacher and Dobby to watch Malfoy, because of less suspicion of Malfoy (he doesn't know he wasn't at the game).

Ron never goes to Slughorn's office on his birthday, and is not poisoned. Slughorn dies because he drinks the poisoned mead while alone in his quarters late at night. The posion is fast acting, so even if he thinks of a bezoar in his death throes, he cannot reach it in time and no one is there to administer it as Harry did for Ron in canon. A House Elf discovers his body in the hour before dawn, when going to light the fire. The aurors are called because it is the second serious incident at the school since its opening for the year. Slughorn's body and the poisoned mead are removed for analysis, and the office is searched. It is inconclusive as to who may have laced the bottle with poison, though Dumbledore, when asked by the Aurors, confirms that Slughorn had been reclusive both in the few years before Voldemort's first death, and since the events of the Triwizard Tournament, out of fear of Death Eater attack. The lack of any hard evidence leads the Aurors to mark his file as a probable assassination, for reasons and by persons unknown.

Because Slughorn dies, Harry never retrieves the pure memory of Riddle. As a result, the true number of Horcruxes desired by Riddle is unknown (though perhaps Dumbledore already suspects true number?). Because of Dumbeldore's ill concealed annoyance at Harry's failure at a time when he should have been mourning, Harry grows wary of Dumbledore's true motivations and begins researching Horcruxes and ancient magical artifacts on his own in the school library. He cannot find information on Horcruxes, but does make very promising discoveries as to items Riddle may have coveted and sought. He does not tell Dumbledore about his findings, reasoning that when Dumbledore is more open with him, he will be more open in return. Dumbledore senses his reticence, and as a result is more reserved about his own thoughts. He eventually decides to seek and destroy the Locket on his own (the location of which he has known or suspected for a long while), despite promising Harry earlier that they would go together. This takes place earlier than in canon, because Dumbledore feels his time growing short and decides that if Harry cannot be relied upon, he must allow himself time to destroy as many Horcruxes as possible before his death. Because there is no one there to force him to keep drinking the potion and protect him, Dumbledore is overcome by the visions the potion produces and is taken by the Inferi. (The Elder Wand is lost to the depths of the pool, its power broken because Dumbledore's death was due to intentional poison and unintentional drowning (misadventure) rather than direct defeat by another wizard.) His disappearance is unremarked upon at first, but it is recognised that he is dead when a charmed letter delivers itself to Minerva McGonagall three days after his departure. The letter informs her that he is more than likely deceased, and that she is his chosen successor. Dumbledore's death is confirmed by the appearance of his portrait in the Headmaster's office, though his cause of death and the location of his body are unknown. When his death becomes public knowledge, general opnion is that his death is the work of Death Eaters, or that Dumbledore had possibly sought out Riddle on his own (as he did Grindlewald) and lost. Letter left for Harry too? Sword, but no stone? What for Hermione?

Because Slughorn dies, Snape uses a Time Turner or other time bending device or spell to teach both DADA and Potions until a substitute arrives. He spots and confiscates the Prince's Advanced Potion Making, both furious at the violation and incredibly satisfied to be proven right about Harry's stunning about-face in Potions. Harry's marks take a noticeable dive, both through lack of the Prince's notes and because of Snape's hard marking. Snape also takes a hefty amount of points and assigns Harry Saturday detentions for a month. Harry is annoyed and frustrated at the punishment and the loss of the book, but also knows that he was cheating in a way, so doesn't feel an overwhelming sense of injustice. Ron is sympathetic about the loss of the book, Hermione insufferably smug, because she didn't like it in the first place and felt annoyed at Harry's better performance in class. Harry's performance in class under the subsitute teacher is better than under Snape, but nowhere near at the level it was with the help of the Prince's book.

Because of Dumbledore's premature death-by-Inferi, Malfoy's task to kill Dumbledore is no longer needed, and he abandons work on the Vanishing Cabinet. Because it is invalidated by Dumbeldore's death, the major part of Snape's Unbreakable Vow (barring his responsibility to protect Draco) is rendered null-and-void with no penalty, and he is freed from his obligation to kill Dumbledore. Neither have to flee Hogwarts unmasked, and Malfoy finishes the year with the rest of the students, though his marks on his examinations are predictably poor. The school is not invaded by Death Eaters, Bill is not mauled, and Tonks misses her opportunity to guilt-trip Remus into marriage (ergo, Teddy is not conceived). The trio also do not gain possession of the false locket with the clue about Regulus Black. (Only Harry ever saw the locket in pensieve memory. Maybe Hermione or Ron recognises it as the locket from GP from the book Harry found in the school library?)


End file.
